Critical thinking EN

Thursday, June 2, 2011

I have found myself more than once in conversations with people who think that in order to explain consciousness and the human mind you need to resort to something "beyond the physical world", something that transcends all the experiments and research done on the mind since it started to be studied in a scientific way. Despite my attempts to offer explanations, they insist in the claim that something like that can't be measured, and that they have seen, felt, or heard from sincere people, things that science can not explain. Leaving anecdotal evidence aside, we should ask ourselves whether the existence of a metaphysical mind as an entity separate from the body, or what many religions call soul or spirit, is something that can really exist.

It could be said that what we do with our mind is to think and take decisions, among other things. With it we can decide to move an arm or a leg, for example. Or maybe start running, or solve an equation with pencil and paper, or even write a blog post. All the actions I mentioned would be impeded if the nerves that connect the brain with the limbs were damaged, as all those who suffer spinal cord injuries bear witness to. This shows that this supposedly incorporeal mind can't control the actions of the body directly, meaning that it would exert the control at the brain level. The soul, in turn, is usually considered as something more emotional and less rational than what is generally known as the so-called "mind", but human emotions can also cause, for example, the heart to beat faster, the face to blush, or even some tears to escape from our eyes. In both cases we find ourselves facing an entity that triggers observable responses in the body it is associated with. And how could something metaphysical cause physical responses? We need some kind of interaction. This mind or soul has to interact in some way with our nervous system to be able to cause an effect on it.

But this is, precisely, what a measurement consists of. In Physics, in order to measure the object being studied, it has to interact in some way with the measurement device, be it the camera on a telescope, a radio antenna, a thermometer, a gravimeter, one of the many detectors in a particle collider, or even the retinas in our eyes or the neurons in our fingers. Without a physical interaction, none of the information the soul or mind could generate can be transmitted to the body —neither a message from some god or spirit, nor a premonition from the future, not even a simple thought. Therefore, if any event of this kind can happen, the absolute impossibility of being measured can't be a characteristic of the entity that causes it. And this in turn implies that, since it has to necessarily undergo a physical interaction, this entity is something also physical and not belonging to another kind of "reality". Since an entity that doesn't belong to the physical world can cause absolutely no alterations on it, it could be considered that for all practical purposes, something like this doesn't exist.

However, could a mind- or soul-like entity actually exist? It has to be said that until today no measurements or experiments have suggested its existence (no, the "aura photography" that was popular years ago doesn't count since its fraudulent nature is proven). But could it be that our technology isn't advanced enough to detect it? It wouldn't be a first. To show some examples, the subatomic particle known as neutrino couldn't be detected until 26 years after its existence was postulated in 1930, and something similar happens with other already confirmed particles (like the top quark) or even the ones that are nowadays searched for in experiments like the LHC to confirm or discard theoretical models. Nevertheless, there are important reasons why these particles were hard to detect. In the case of neutrinos, we find that they interact so weakly with matter that if we pointed a beam of them to a wall made of lead, we would need a thickness of more than a light year for it to be able to stop just half of the neutrinos that traveled through it. Other particles, like the top quark, are so heavy that are only created in processes so energetic that they would have… adverse effects if they happened routinely in our body. So if any energetic particle that transports information from the mind or the soul to our brain (and vice-versa) actually existed, it would have to interact enough with matter to cause effects in this organ, and we should be able to produce it at energies much lower than the maximum limit of our accelerators. Something like that would in principle have already been detected some time ago. And if the interaction between soul/mind and brain belongs to a kind completely new and unknown to science, the equations that describe all particle physics would have to be altered in a way that everything we've known about matter until now would be contradicted, as Sean Carroll explains well in this detailed post. Since these equations describe with precision everything that happens in everyday scales, it doesn't seem like a viable option.

But there's a chance remaining. Maybe the soul/mind can't be measured with common instruments because it interacts specifically with the neurons in the brain. That it only affects these, would explain the impossibility of measurement mentioned earlier, but some interesting details emerge here. Indeed, if there exists a soul or mind separate from the body, it seems that its relation to neurons is incredibly close. Decades of research on brain damage injuries have shown how, depending on the region of the brain they affect, cognitive abilities or even the personality can be drastically altered. If all or at least part of these characteristics belong to the soul or the mind, then it seems that this one gets modified according to the changes in brain structure. Even inserting hormones, medicines or drugs can have an effect on the abilities or feelings it expresses in each moment. It is as if this mind or soul was a faithful reflection of neuronal activity and how it is affected by internal or external agents. And if we have it this way, wouldn't we have to consider that the soul or mind could just be the result of the coordinated actions of millions of neurons in an extremely complex organ through purely biological processes, instead of invoking a supernatural entity as an explanation? In view of the objections exposed along this text, it seems the most reasonable option.

Throughout my life, I have been trying harder each time to make my beliefs have a basis as solid as possible. To question what one believes, and to be able to explain why one thinks such things, are essential tools to be able to get rid of biases when making interpretations and taking decisions that can be very relevant in the path one chooses to follow in life, so I try to apply them whenever is possible. What can be read here are the arguments that make me not believe in the existence of a mind or soul as a supernatural entity separate from the body it is normally associated with. Of course, they're subject to change when faced with evidence of their inaccuracy if that evidence is reasonable. And since a huge amount of people have an opinion about this issue which is contrary to mine, I think it can be useful to leave them expressed here. All criticism is welcome.

Sunday, November 7, 2010

These had been decades of prosperity. Some were starting to refer to them as "the golden age" of human progress in the entire recent history, going back several centuries into the past. And all of this thanks to a small star, not very different from our Sun, more than a hundred light years away. When one stopped to think about it, it seemed incredible how that little dot of light had exerted such a powerful influence in the course Humanity headed for. A dot among many, which a century earlier wouldn't have had even the slightest importance among the hundreds of thousands of its class in the whole of the night sky. But this dot, only this particular one, turned out to be special.

Everything started with an automated monitoring, one among several, of the brightness variations of a great number of stars in broad regions of the sky. Its aim, to detect the crossing of planets in front of them in case their orbits were aligned with our solar system. And this was one of the stars that fulfilled these conditions. It was among the ones that for a brief amount of time was partially covered by a gas giant in its orbit, and recorded as such. But unlike in others, this event would not repeat itself days or weeks later, not even in months. This planet had not migrated towards the inner regions of its system to remain exposed to temperatures able to melt metals because of the closeness to its star —it remained at a prudent distance since its formation. Almost fourteen terrestrial years were necessary for this distant sun to be eclipsed again by the giant, but by then the eyes of humanity were already completely turned towards this region of the sky.

While this colossus followed its path impassively, governed by the laws of celestial mechanics, changes in brightness and radial velocity of a much lower magnitude had started to attract attention. A few much smaller planets orbited the star in the inner regions of the system, with orbits between a few months and a couple of years long. Small rocky planets in the middle of what would be considered to be the habitable zone, exactly where you would hope to find a new Earth, and with masses that were not out of proportion. Bodies of this kind were starting to be found around other stars, becoming the first steps towards the answer of one of the great questions in history. When the sensitivity of spectrometers increased enough, the study of their atmospheres and composition came soon after, and it was then when the vision of the place of humanity's home world in the cosmos started to change forever. A decades-long search was being performed with the hope of knowing if life was possible in worlds different from ours, both in the Solar System and others, and after so much time it had at last been fruitful.

It turned out that not only one, but two of the worlds in that remote system bustled with life. The lines in their spectra were clear, unambiguously showing the ingredients that formed their atmospheres, but the interpretation of these compositions was at first disturbing: there was no way in which known or predicted geological or inorganic processes could support such a chemical imbalance. Despite the fact that the existence of extraterrestrial life was the simplest explanation for this phenomenon, finding it for the first time in history in such abundance and with that level of development was something so hard do accept by human mentality that years of verifications and discarding of alternate proposals were needed before claiming the discovery as definitive. But once done, and when the shock and incredible initial agitation were overcome, the news were accepted more as a confirmation than an unexpected finding. Just like the discovery of the first extrasolar planet in the last years of the previous century, this one had been preceded by decades of tales and stories in which it was taken for granted, waiting for improvements in the instrumentation to have the evidence on its side. Earth was not unique in the Universe.

This discovery, however, brought consequences that were still hard to assimilate. The relative closeness of the star, at just a blink of an eye in cosmic scales, together with the exuberance of its system, seemed to support the hypothesis that life was spread out all over the galaxy. Would it be possible that the closeness of two solar systems with life so prosperous was just an incredible statistical anomaly? It seemed unlikely. And that's how it was reflected in space developments in the years after. New orbital telescopes with greater capabilities were launched, carrying out a thorough scrutiny of the sky in search of other worlds full of evolutionary possibilities. Some candidates would be found in the course of time, but all of them were far from being so clear and conclusive. Meanwhile, improvements in the instrumentation and new interferometers permitted to continue studying that first system, in which the measurement of radial velocity, its light curve and even direct imaging made it possible to discover a couple of extra outer gas giants, and to refine the orbits and sizes of the planets already known.

While the space agencies took advantage of the renewed interest to obtain better and needed funding, and astrobiology got revolutionized thanks to this by studying the first known data of what was its true field, the amateur astronomers community grew enormously. Many were those who wanted to take a look at this star, and with an ever increasing number of people in possession of equipment as good as those of modest professional observatories just a decade before, the available data about this neighbouring system were abundant.

It was the best of these data, together with the last advances in the professional observation technologies, what would help solve one of the small mysteries that arose in this system. Sometimes there were detected what seemed to be transits of lone objects the size of planetary moons, which we were starting to be able to observe, but didn't correspond with any Doppler shift of the star in consequence. Among other things it was speculated that they might be small sunspots, but their crossings in front of the bright star were too short-lived, and they didn't have the variability expected of something like it. However, what could be measured was that the way in which they hid the light of their sun showed deviations of what would be expected if these bodies were spherical. Suspicions by the scientific community, to whom it was harder each time to be cautious before jumping to conclusions that could be described as exotic, increased over the years, as another characteristic shown by a subgroup of these objects was confirmed. In a way not explainable with gravitational interactions, their orbits had varied noticeably between a transit and the next.

Scientists were not wrong when they changed the way these objects were named. Gigantic structures, the origin of which could not be natural, were orbiting that system. And some kind of civilization was using them.

One could only speculate about the role those structures might play, but there was something clear. We were faced with a sign of extraterrestrial intelligence, and with a technological level more advanced than humans', visible on our instruments. The news touched something sensitive in the spirit of humanity, and questions multiplied. Would they know about our existence? It was not very probable. The last light that would have reached them from our system, from which it departed more than a century ago, would have barely started to show the intense changes our species would cause on the planet later on. Furthermore, it was impossible to see a transit of the Earth and the Sun from their position, so studying the characteristics of the abundant terrestrial life was more complicated, but maybe for their technological level these were not big challenges. However, despite all this, the fact that captivated more minds and appeared in many more headlines was something different —if they were not lost among the variations of background noise, our first radio, radar and television emissions would reach their system in just a few decades.

Would their hypothetic inhabitants be able to receive and interpret these signals? And that being the case, would there be an answer? Could we be receiving the first extraterrestrial transmission after a wait of less than two centuries? There were people who thought we could, and if the advances made to fight aging continued developing at this rate, some might get to live through it. And they wanted to see it. It was true that a discernible radio signal had never been received from that system, but humanity itself was ceasing to be detectable in those waves with the change to digital transmission languages. Something similar could have happened there. In the background, however, there was a more important matter. In the same way as we could only be seen as we were a century ago, the light arriving to us from that system had an identical delay. Who knew what the technological level of that civilization would be when they became aware of our presence. If they had developed interstellar travel, it was even possible that an encounter could take place in the future. In what position would we be? It was clear that they had a great lead over us, enough so that they would not find it hard at all to subjugate or eliminate us if it was considered convenient.

However that didn't intimidate us. Quite the opposite, space technology started to develop with a greater boost than the one initially provided by the discovery of extrasolar life. Maybe it was this kind of competition never oficially proclaimed, but present as a possibility in the thoughts of many people, what had been missing in the previous decades to make human beings spread among the Solar System. In a short period of time the number of missions and space stations increased, and the Moon was set foot on again, aiming to establish permanent colonies on it. But the most important of all was the degree of international collaboration that was being achieved in these projects. It seemed that the great discovery of a different civilization had another effect in human perception —self-consciously or not, we assumed the concept of humanity as 'our civilization', to which we all belonged without distinction. The clashes and old rivalries between powers were apparently being pushed into the background, in the face of the mutual progress our species was achieving in this insignificant corner of the Cosmos. And the advances were remarkable. Space colonization had repercussions with improvements in the living standards, while the pressure on the precious ecosystems on Earth started to diminish. Human beings set foot on Mars, and microbial life ended up being discovered in the red planet, so close but paradoxically never seen until then, strengthening the conviction that life was abundant all over the galaxy. More missions to search for it in any form were sent to Venus and the outer planets, as a display of the optimism resulting from having found it spread among the stars.

While humanity developed its own space structures in the form of habitats, power stations and solar sails, it kept its eyes on the sky. The star that started everything was constantly scrutinized to see what else could be learned from their inhabitants. Photometric techniques were already allowing to even obtain rudimentary maps of their planets' surfaces, and there was even a serious proposal to send a big space telescope to the place where the Sun's gravity focused the light of that distant system, which would enable us to analyze it with an unprecedented level of detail.

And the fact is that there was a lesson learnt while observing the movements of those beings. A lesson maybe more important than any other, and with an influence that was felt in many of the great events of those last years. A lesson that filled with hope a species that had lived in the uncertainty of the possibility of self-destruction in the previous century. To be able to see a much more advanced civilization prospering in another system was proof that the technological adolescence that several times was close to exterminate our culture could be overcome.

Our survival, and the expansion of our legacy throughout the Cosmos, were possible.

Friday, June 4, 2010

At the beginning of april this year, someone called Alberto Geyer, with username @solarview, added me on Twitter. I saw his account was about astronomy, but at first I didn't pay it much attention. However, a few days later I took a look at his profile out of curiosity, and I saw that he seemed to take pictures of Solar System objects. In some occasions he sent tweets to important users, like @NewHorizons2015, the probe that will arrive to Pluto that year, @CassiniSaturn, the one that orbits Saturn in these moments, @plutokiller, the astrophysicist Mike Brown who discovered Eris, etc., to show them, saying that with a new technique he achieved very good quality. So I clicked on one picture of Jupiter's moon Europa, that he had uploaded on Twitpic, and it looked good to me, but at the same time something arose my suspicions: I'd seen Hubble images that had less resolution of Jupiter's moons than this picture had.

It was at this point when I decided to visit his webpage, and I got disappointed. I saw that nearly all the photographs were either exaggerated amplifications of the noise in the image so that it looked like detail in the surface of the imaged bodies, or images taken by NASA probes the quality of which had been reduced afterwards. According to him, he took those images from Earth with his backyard telescope. My first impression: it was all a Photoshop hoax. I realized that among his tweets there were some replying to someone who didn't believe he got those results, and to whom he said to look at the raw images (the image with the unaltered data taken from the CCD, the camera used for astrophotography) posted on the web precisely for the unbelievers. Since it looked like it was a fraud, I decided to send him a message via Twitter that started an entire argument, of which some of my contacts were witnesses. In this conversation I tried to debunk his wrong assertions, while he systematically denied everything. Watching the conversation one could get an idea of the credibility of this Alberto Geyer, and it didn't speak well of him. I suppose that for this very reason, a few days later he deleted all his tweets regarding this issue and he continued his activities as if nothing had happened. Due to this, and after seeing his number of followers and admirers that think he really gets those images with honest means was still growing, I decided to write this post reproducing the entire conversation (which I saved at the time), adding explanations to clarify what happened while tweets followed one another. All the URLs of the original tweets are linked in the usernames, as well as the tweets being referred to when they are replies. Translations of the tweets in Spanish are in italics. Everything started like this:

DarkSapiens: @solarview Wow, took a look at your webpage and turns out it's all photoshopped… Nice trick, but misleading people is never good.

Solarview: @DarkSapiens What you saw is what is there!Take a moment to download the raw images on every each page.That was made available for doubters

DarkSapiens: @solarview I saw enough. Pluto is made amplifying the noise at such high levels that looks like detail. Any other blob would do the same.

Pluto. In which Alberto Geyer claims to have discovered a mountain 400 or 500 km in height. In the web itself there are published two sequences of screen captures (I y II) in which he shows his process. Starting from a little spot with a quite a lot of noise, he gets a pretty circle with what looks like a lot of surface detail. Detail that wasn't in the original image. And it is interesting to see that Geyer claims that the mountain can be seen from Earth in the unprocessed image, as something sticking out from the edge of the spot. A spot that is actually the combined light of Pluto and its moons Charon, Nix and Hydra, a point-like image and not the disk of the planet, that falls well below the resolution level.

We go on.

DarkSapiens: @solarview Mars has images of the mounts pasted on top of it to make it appear more detailed. And they're in wrong positions.

As can be seen here. The mounts being lit from the side while light arrives to the planet head on is also priceless.

DarkSapiens: @solarview Enceladus would be a bit more believable without the jets. It's even a shame someone has to say that.

Enceladus is already unbelievable. The jets, that were discovered by the Cassini precisely because this moon was between the Sun and the probe, are added lightly by Alberto Geyer in the image, and what's more, going in both directions (the real ones only come out from one side) and rotated with regard to their true position. Do you see those blue lines in the image? (Better in the original, in which by the way they look blue because it's in false color) That's the region from where they actually come out.

DarkSapiens: @solarview It's so obvious you took pictures from the space probes and reduced the quality. In some cases I even remember the original one.

DarkSapiens: @solarview Oh, and Mercury in full phase, something only achievable when it's BEHIND the Sun. Yeah right… :)

Solarview: @DarkSapiens Go On Sapiens!Keep visiting our website!You obviously never saw a CCD camera let alone look in the eyepiece of a telescope!

DarkSapiens: @solarview Your last phrase is dead wrong. I'll visit your web later and tweet the URLs with links to the original images for ppl to compare

Since I belong to a good astronomical association where several members do astrophotography, and I even have a modest telescope, it can be said that this claim bothered me. Especially because of him denying in this way something that I was showing him in great detail…

Solarview: @DarkSapiens O.K. Why don't u start with Io's eruptions.The ejecta is right there in the raw image.Io is third from Jupiter.

The image from Wikipedia should be inverted from left to right and rotated a bit to fit exactly with the details of the volcanoes seen in the surface of Io in his picture, but nothing more. To explain the out of focus thing we have to go to the raw image, from which the following is a portion (click to enlarge):

In it it can be seen how Jupiter is overexposed to bring out the fainter moons, but those don't have a point-like shape, but its shape is a strange curve with several details. You can also see that this curve is in the same orientation for the three moons in the image (Io is in the lower right). This can not be due to the Sun lighting them in an angle, since Jupiter is much further out from the Sun than Earth, and as seen from here it will lit them always face on. This curved shape is precisely due to the image being out of focus, creating the same pattern in all of them.

At this point I decide to announce in public what I am doing, while Alberto Geyer continues replying.

The raw image from which he supposedly creates his Mercury image is below, and a zoom on it after that.

In the zoomed image it can be seen, however, that only one every four pixels are dark in what would apparently be what divides the blob in two, what made me think he uses a color CCD (specifically, I think he uses this one). It is interesting, because this kind of cameras are not recommended in astrophotography if you want to get a high level of detail (precisely what Alberto Geyer wants), because there is a loss of resolution by using contiguous pixels for different colors. The preferable method is to use a monochrome camera and take several shots with color filters, making use in this way of the maximum resolution in all channels. Nevertheless, judging by the moons of Mars here, it seems that for his "processings" he uses all pixels at once, with no color distinction, increasing the irregularity of the final product, so this issue doesn't seem to be important to him.

I concentrate now in the conditions to take the picture. To tell you the truth, it may not be completely impossible to capture an image of Mercury in superior conjunction (when it is just on the other side of the Sun), since the tilt of its orbit is different from ours and not every year this planet passes behind our star (like there are no transits every year). Mercury would still be very close to the Sun, but there are very experienced astrophotographers that manage to take pictures of the crescent Moon only a few hours from the new phase. I don't really know if the brightness of the Sun would hid Mercury, but maybe trying it when the first one is below the horizon it could be done (with the inconvenient that the atmospheric distortion would be very big at such low height, so not much detail will be got). But well, since when I write this post I have time at my disposal, I have the possibility of doing what he tells me in his tweets: check the image information. Raw images in FITS format have the so called "header" with all data about it. Among them you can find the following:

In the observation date you can see 2008-09-06, or 9/6 2008, at 19:07:30 local time (22:07:30 GMT). This can correspond either to June 9th or September 6th of that year. So, armed with any sky simulation software, one can check the positions of the planets at both dates. I tried to test with June 9th, from some place in Brazil (consistent both with his webpage and the difference between local time and GMT), and I saw how the shot would be done at nightfall, but oh! Mercury would be lower in the horizon than the Sun itself despite being quite close. Then I dug a little further… and to my surprise the planet is not in superior conjunction, but in inferior. With what consequence? No less than causing the face of Mercury visible from Earth to be the nocturnal one. The planet is between the Sun and us, and we don't see its light because its lit part is on the other side. It's impossible to take a picture of Mercury in these conditions. We try with the other date… and we don't have inferior conjunction either, but the planet is almost in its greatest elongation, the further from the Sun that it can be seen from Earth. Maybe the next image clarifies a bit all these positions:

As you can see in it, when an interior planet is in that position, we can only see half of the lit face. So if the image was taken in this second date (and this tweet points to this being the case), and Alberto Geyer's method did really reveal details of the bodies he observes, Mercury should appear with a half-moon look in the image. As I tell him, the round shape of the objects in their images is not there, but he forces it as part of the processing.

Meanwhile, in the Twitter conversation, he continues using as an argument that I don't know anything about astrophotography.

Solarview: @DarkSapiens U need get started with astro-imaging.U obviously can't tell what's in focus or not before you comment on somebody else's work

DarkSapiens: @solarview All moons have the same curved shape as a result of being out of focus in that image. And if you take the full circle increasing>

DarkSapiens: @solarview > the cutoff, you end with moons much bigger than Earth compared to Jupiter.

I stop for a moment to explain this last comment from me. "Increase the cutoff" is the expression that stuck to my head using the astronomical image analysis software during the project in which I worked this year (of what I will talk in a future post), and it would consist of a way to increase the visibility of the image taking for the maximum luminosity value a slightly lower one than the value it had originally. You enhance the less bright areas while the ones already bright get saturated. In the Jupiter image, doing this you can see the full circular shape corresponding to the out of focus image of all its moons:

And if we continue forcing it, the uneven illumination in the out of focus zone is leveled until it forms a saturated circle from which every detail you could previously get has disappeared:

If we remember than the size of Jupiter is not bigger than in the first of these three images (close to the beginning of the post, where Jupiter is already saturated), we see than the resulting circles in this last one have approximately a fourth of its diameter. That is, if Alberto Geyer claims that those circles are the actual shape of the jovian moons, these have between 2 and 3 times the diameter of the Earth itself.

The discussion continues like this:

Solarview: @DarkSapiens Look Sapiens,there's a way to put an end to this discussion.I can send u the development procedure for any one of the imagesO.K

DarkSapiens: @solarview Let's see the Io one. I saw the sequence for Pluto and what you did was magnify the noise in the image and make the blob round.

Solarview: @DarkSapiens Eor dead wrong.I just imaged Pluto again and the mountain is looking better than never.I'll send the whole procedure via e-mail

Solarview: @DarkSapiens It's their real dimension.Maybe you don't know ,but Jupiter got closer to Earth on 08/14/10 than it was in many years.Go study!

Go study. Told to me that someone that seemingly just claimed that the moons of Jupiter, but not the planet, look bigger if both get closer to Earth. And by the way, if I have interpreted the date correctly as October 14th, 2008 (the only one that made sense, without being in the future nor needing a 14-month year), Jupiter was not as close from Earth as it could be (in opposition), but it was rather close to quadrature. The matter of Pluto has already been commented above.

If only one of the three scientists to whom that tweet was directed had taken a look, Alberto Geyer would have seen himself under all their influence, orders of magnitud greater than mine. But with thousands of followers each, it was difficult that they could pay attention to this simple message.

DarkSapiens: @solarview I said big relative to Jupiter. The planet being closer has no effect on this.

No, I don't do astrophotography because I lack the means to. But I have seen many shots from some CIDAM member. Compare the size of the moons with that of Jupiter in this animation. I could also stress than to get good images of celestial planetary bodies a video is done for each frame, to then average the results and get rid as much as possible from the noise and atmospheric distortion. Just the opposite of what Alberto Geyer does.

Already seeing that his only answer is to deny the obvious, I decide to post links from his web together with the original images taken by the probes, as I warned I would do, so everybody can compare. Adding "@solarview" in the tweet, he would get the notice.

Titan, the biggest moon of Saturn, taken from a false color image that combines certain wavelengths in the infrared with others in the ultraviolet. And he leaves the same colors even when they are very far from reality. At least he could had got an image in the visible range.

Again, search for the original image in SPACENOW and you'll see that the object is the same. But if you don't believe your eyes the problem is yours.

Solarview: @DarkSapiens You know your own words.Why don't you send us yous best astrophotos?Let's sees the expert's work!

Now his tactics are to ask me to show astroimages made by me, and I assume he's trying to discredit me by making me pass, again, for someone who has no idea of astrophotography. Due to the delay between the posting and reading of tweets, the conversation becomes a bit harder to follow. I continued linking to comparatives:

(That last tweet is in response to "there are no differences because it is the same object". They being the same object doesn't mean it has to look exactly the same from Earth than from a probe in its proximity)

Solarview: @DarkSapiens All you do is import pictures from other sources and pass it on to yet othersGo make your own images!Get going with astrophotos

Here either he doesn't understand why am I posting images from the probes or he tries to deviate attention. Of course I post images from other sources and not mine. If what I am trying to show is that the detail in his pictures comes from those images, what sense would it make to post pictures from another astrophotographer?

I, meanwhile, was still showing him reasons that supported my claims:

DarkSapiens: .@solarview BTW, for Titan you should have used a different image, not the IR + UV false color one…

Solarview: @DarkSapiens If you take the trouble to download the Kleopatra raw image u'll see that it stands out even in the midle of the starfield

Being honest, I didn't download that image. I don't know if he refers to the asteroid stands out (a thing that, if it's only a point of light, wouldn't have much importance), or that its shape is visible. But a Google images search reveals it is hard to image. Its shape can be inferred by radar, but taking a picture using traditional means is complicated.

The Iapetus image has even some of the smallest details taken from that image, that is only rotated. The second tweet is a better response to the "there are no differences because it is the same object" thing.

Here, now it seems that he wants to put me to the test. Even knowing that it wouldn't make a big difference (one could perfectly look it up in the Internet in the time it takes to send a reply), I decide to be honest in my response and I reply by heart:

DarkSapiens: @solarview They're images taken for post-processing, in order to calibrate the picture and get rid of CCD or ambient issues.

DarkSapiens: @solarview You substract the Dark because if not, the background level could be not black thus affecting photometry and other things.

DarkSapiens: @solarview You take the bias image to get rid of a bias introduced by the CCD, again affecting photometry in each pixel.

Solarview: @DarkSapiens That was close.A serious astro-imager doesn't subtract these shots on a post processing.They're done at picture taking time.

Let's see. The darks and bias are images made with the camera covered so you only get the alterations and noise created by the instrumental, to precisely be able to eliminate it later from the photograph. They are separated images. I don't know how are you going to subtract them from the picture if this one is not taken yet. And once all images are taken, what influence would it have to make the processing (subtracting them) the same night or months after taken? They are computer files. When are they used is irrelevant. To know more about these shots I found some days ago this easy article (in Spanish), quite explanatory.

DarkSapiens: @solarview The darks are taken when you take the picture, but you can substract them later.

DarkSapiens: @solarview Oh, didn't see the flat thing. You take it to get rid of uneven illumination caused by the telescope, lenses, filters, etc.

Solarview: @DarkSapiens Now that you just read the theory,go out there and try it out.After you show me your own work,not NASA's,come back and we talk

As it was probable to happen, he already knew I could easily read instead of explain by heart these things. And it seemed he was not going to admit in public that I did know about astrophotography. He continues using this as his main argument and he insists that I have to show him my work and not NASA's. I don't see any sense to this other than deviate the subject, since the only images we were talking about here were his, made from the ones by the space agency. What I could picture or not doesn't matter at all. And that's what I tell him:

DarkSapiens: .@solarview LOL, I wrote, not read. And if I'm saying you use NASA images, why should I show my photos if they have nothing to do here?

Solarview: @DarkSapiens Because you never took a shot at the heavens.That's why Get out and get a life.Quit the computer screen.Get experience.Goodbye

DarkSapiens: .@solarview Haha, I was with my astronomy association yesterday, btw. So you can't prove your images are not from NASA, then?

It is funny that in his last comment he treated me now as if I had never looked at the sky, when precisely the day before I had spent the night doing astronomical observation with my association. He never replied again to any of my questions. It is possible that to cut all contact he blocked me, and then as I describe in the beginning he deleted everything that referred to this conversation.

If you have continued reading until here this long post you may ask the question of why do I bother to do all this rebuttal work. First, I could refer to the name of this blog, and claim that as other bloggers uncover the lies of homeopathy, of lunar conspiracy theories, or every other fraud, here I was faced with one directly related with my main area of knowledge: astronomy. Even when my goal is to dedicate myself to it as a professional, I don't dedicate to it all the space I would like in this blog, and this could be also an opportunity to explain some concepts. Second, the reason to have saved all this conversation was to make it public and accessible, especially in case it was eliminated (as it can be checked clicking in the links for @solarview comments, these don't lead to much, although Google's cache saves two small fragments [UPDATE september 17th 2010: Well, at least it did when I wrote this post…]).

Another important trigger, and in fact what made me decide completely to write this post, was when I saw that apparently he hoped to be present as a speaker in the TEDx event organized in the Rio de Janeiro planetarium sending this video. Mysteriously, it stopped loading a few days ago (the ones from all the other candidates still work), but in it some parts of the procedure done to get the image of Io were shown, and you could see how it consisted just in saturating the image of the moon as I show above and increasing the contrast to round its shape more. Then the process jumps directly to an image already with the color in the NASA image included and in which you saw how messing a bit with Photoshop he starts getting more details from it, but it doesn't show what happens between one step and the other. [13/8/2010: UPDATE! Geyer has uploaded full on his website the video for the Io processing, that the one I mention before has as background. You can see what I mention in this paragraph, although he gets the color from nowhere actually, modifying at a guess the levels histogram many times. That is, where before there was only black and white, he adds color gradually until it looks to him sufficiently similar to the images… that he has seen from the NASA probes] In the video, Geyer, a man seemingly between thirty and forty years old, insists that his is a "cheap and effective" method for the research of the Solar System, that almost everyone could implement. Imagine if all this was true. It would be an authentic revolution.

But in the light of the evidence, I wonder: what is really his aim? His now disappeared video, despite having a huge lot of negative votes, has some 18 comments supporting and admiring him, even offering him funding to develop his project. The number of followers of his twitter has nearly doubled since he added me. Is it fame and admirers what he seeks? Being recognized by the people who doesn't have enough knowledge to realize that everything is a fraud? In his claims he seem to be convinced that his method is a big advance, and even wanting to share his "technique" with professionals. Could this be true? He must have manipulated the pictures to get the final result, data from Hubble telescope have allowed to construct approximate maps of Pluto and there's no sign of the gigantic mountain, that will be absent when New Horizons flies by the dwarf planet in 2015. Could he be convinced that what he does really works? Is it possible for levels of self-delusion of one person to reach those extremes?

Whatever the motivation, there are reasons for which something like this shouldn't be left without a categorical reply. The amateur astronomers community has been some time fighting to be recognized among professionals as a very good complement for research. And a lot is being achieved: from following and discovering asteroids to alerting of new supernovae, monitoring possible changes in Mars, Saturn and Jupiter (like the disappearing of one of his belts or even, today, of a new impact with some wanderer object), amateur astronomers are contributing with valuable observations. But amateurs like Alberto Geyer still make the level of distrust not to be low. I know other cases in which some amateur astronomer thinks he has a level of knowledge quite superior to the real one and he tries to explain to laypersons in the matter concepts that are erroneous, or who think to have made an important discovery that when it is dismissed by professionals as a false alarm, they adopt the role of misunderstood people.

But the most important, to my judgement, is the following: if people think it is so easy to study the Solar System in such a cheap way, why would they support the public investment in multimillion-dollar missions that wouldn't make such a big difference with what can be done for an extremely low fraction of its cost? If the spending in space exploration is perceived as something even less important than many people think, the fight for a needed increase in these budgets would have one more burden. And I have already talked about how important this investment is.

Adding any extra difficulty to the funding of these kind of projects is an action, at least to my judgement, quite reprehensible.

17/09/2010 UPDATE: Taking a look at the blog statistics I found that someone in the Space.com forums found Geyer's work and they were discussing it, and they linked to the Spanish version of this post on the issue. They are still debating about it there, and this motivated me to translate this post to English, something I had still left to do.

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Several weeks ago I was having a conversation with someone and somehow we started talking about death. She told me that —since she didn't share the belief that you existed after it— death was something she was very scared of. And who wouldn't be. When you live, you think about the great amount of things you would like to do, all the places you would like to visit, everything you could learn along the years… You wish you had as much time as possible to do all this. Therefore, the perspective that you might cease to exist one day, that all those potential actions would suddenly vanish into nothingness with no chance to rectify so you have another opportunity to fulfill them, is something that, at least, can be disturbing. At first I agreed with her, and meanwhile I thought that this reminded me of the song Thoughts of a Dying Atheist, from Muse:

However, since the fist time I listened to that song, it seemed to me that something in it wasn't quite right. Was it possible that if you refused to believe in the afterlife –something for which there's no empirical evidence– fear was the only remaining reaction when faced to these thoughts? That certainly isn't what it causes on me, and I felt a bit uncomfortable listening to those lyrics. They seemed to imply that the way to go through those moments remaining calm is not to be an atheist, or something similar.

So, still in the conversation, I decided to recover a phrase I came up with when I was a kid, and has been my approach to the problem since then: 'once dead, it's impossible for you to care about it' And this is a key point. You won't be there to regret being unable to enjoy your existence. If you don't believe in the afterlife, it's consistent to conclude that you're not going to remain as a spectator, remembering all those things you won't in the entire eternity be able to do again. The only source of concern would be to think about the things you're not doing when you're still alive, the only possible suffering related to the period after your death would be to be scared of it when your existence hasn't yet finished. Therefore my recommendation would be to to make the most of the time you have by doing those things you've always wanted (or at least the ones allowed by your resources), and not to leave everything for later. In the case death was sudden, you don't even have the chance to worry about this.

The problem would be in the case of a slow death, being aware that the end is coming, having time to think about it. The longer the agony, the more time you spend bedridden by whatever causes your death –and it could just be your own old age– the more worry would mean not being able to enjoy those things you planned. I suppose it's in this scenario where Muse's song would be more meaningful, but it may actually not be death what causes that fear, but the disability itself. As I already told this person some time ago, to be left incapacitated (especially if it's some mental faculty) is something that I personally find more terrifying that the simple act of dying. The inability to do tasks and being fully or partially aware of this, seeing how you lose faculties and are not able to carry out certain activities no matter how hard you try, going blind, suffering brain damage, Alzheimer's disease, are among the things I could answer if someone asked me to tell something that would scare me. But not dying. You can suffer while you're alive, but there's nothing you could experience after your own death.

Sunday, February 7, 2010

It can't be said that I'm a superstitious person. In fact, those of you who know me know that the truth is just the opposite. All my experience tells me the good or bad fortune of someone in a certain moment is due to a collection of causes that can, or not, be tracked to a possible origin. In the second case, it is when one would talk of "randomness". Because of this, that the good or bad luck of someone was due to some kind of blessing or curse, that certain person or institution might have an intrinsic ability to attract beneficial events by some supernatural means, that because of breaking a mirror or walking under a ladder one would suffer some disgrace, or that rubbing a lottery ticket against someone's bald head would increase my probability of getting the prize is something that doesn't find a rational justification in my mind.

Why? It depends on what does one understand by "luck". When I say that something was lucky, I generally mean that it had a low probability of happening, and nevertheless it did. And to help something to happen, the best thing you could do is to act in some way increasing that little probability to a higher level. For this, obviously the act you do would have some kind of causal relation with the event you want to favour. How could it increase the probabilities of it happening if what we do doesn't have any relation to that event? For all I know, it has not been proved that rubbing a lottery ticket had increased above the statistical noise the frequency of one number being the winning one, nor that the breaking of a mirror had caused someone seven years of disgrace out of what would have happened by normal means, to continue with those examples. Not to mention that there are not plausible mechanisms for which these two things could affect in some way the result.

But however, it must have been thousands the times I've wished good luck to someone, as it can be shown, and if one thinks about it this can be contradictory with what I said above. How can saying "good luck" or "have very good luck" have something to do with the fortune of the person in what he or she were going to do from now on? The answer is easy —it has hardly any influence. Saying it doesn't automatically increase the possibilities of success as if by magic. Does this mean I consider it an empty expression? Something I tell people, knowing it doesn't have an effect, because it's a mere social convention? My response here is clear —not at all. When I say good luck to someone, what I'm actually doing is to express my most sincere wishes that the probability of success in what he or she were going to do was really higher than expected. I'm telling this person that I'd like him or her to manage to do that task. And I say it sincerely. In fact it's probable that showing my support with this expression I can cheer this person up, which could, exactly, rise the possibilities of him or her succeeding.

And having mentioned the topic of wishes, I'll take this opportunity to comment on a detail of me that's less known. And the thing is that I make wishes to shooting stars. It's not a joke, I've done it more than once. Before saying why, I'll stress to believe the things I believe I normally have solid reasons (susceptible of being dismissed by convincing arguments), and that I use to act consequently. Seeing all I've written in this text, one can follow the same reasoning to wonder why do I do that. It seems obvious that making a wish when a shooting star goes by is not going to make it become true, since it's hard, if not impossible, to find a causal relationship between both. Can it be that making the wish after contemplating the meteor cheers me up and that encourages me to achieve it? It's a possibility, but it seems something a bit farfetched. Furthermore, this rules out being able to wish something you don't have control over. No, these are not my reasons.

But think for a moment: supposing these wishes did become true… what would you ask for? This is an interesting question. If given the chance, would I ask for the first thing that comes to my mind? I wouldn't consider it sensible. It may actually be some caprice, that in the long term causes more bad than good. Or that it was something relatively easy to get by other means, so the wish would have been wasted. No, it has to be something more important. Since I stopped to think about this, I consider it a quite interesting exercise. One starts to think about his priorities, that sometimes end up being reorganized. You think about what would you really want, or even in which ways could it be achieved. If conditions are right, a meteor shower can be a good occasion to consider these things, that can become an extra motivation to try to see more meteors. What better moment to spend with these kind of thoughts that lying down in the night, relaxed, contemplating the sky full of stars, and being amazed from time to time at how a tiny grain of dust with enough speed can create such a short lived but eye-catching sight? In my opinion, there's no other…

Wednesday, July 22, 2009

It must have started already. With a smile, he finished the verification of the two spacesuits, both his and the one for the person who accompanied him, almost as tall as himself, and pressed the controls to open the airlock. The incredibly long shadows that crossed the lunar landscape appeared in front of them, a familiar sight for the last several years.

—Let's go, son —He told his companion, beckoning to him while he made his way towards the slope of Shackleton's rim—. We'll see it better from here.

Both of them travelled a dozen of graceful steps uphill and the father made a gesture in the direction opposite to the one the Sun would have at that moment.

—Look at the Earth, and tell me what you see.

The son turned to look, but it seemed to take him a bit to realize:

—Whoaa! There's a dark spot!
—Yes, you see it? —He could almost see the amazed expression of the kid through his helmet visor.
—What is that, dad? —The son said, excited. His father waited a second to reply while he kept smiling.
—Our shadow —He said still looking at the planet, letting his son grasp the magnitude of what was happening.
—Really? —He stopped to think for a moment, and turned to his father with the mouth open— From the entire Moon?
—Yes —He looked at him, happy that he was learning so many things—. This time it's us who stand between them and the Sun.

The boy remembered what his father showed him from that same location two weeks before, when the Sun was just in the place of the sky the Earth always occupied, and the planet hid it completely. For a few moments the darkness in the surface was complete– until a totally unexpected ring of a bright red colour surrounded the Earth, and there in the Moon everything remained lit in a tenuous crimson shade for many long minutes.

—I liked it better the other time. It doesn't seem like anything there turned red… —he said, squinting at the planet while he continued watching how the blurry lunar shadow was travelling across it.

His father agreed.
—It's always more spectacular when the Sun is the hidden body, and the Moon doesn't have an atmosphere to bend the red light towards there, like I explained to you —he admitted—. But an eclipse like today's, seen from there… —He paused— From Earth, the Moon and the Sun have almost exactly the same size in the sky, so watching them coincide is something incredible… Furthermore, the sky, the colour of which is normally a very light blue, gets darker by the minute… and one can see the shadow approaching from the distance while a cold wind starts stroking your skin… —He turned to his son and touched his shoulder— Renting a mobility-help exoskeleton is still expensive, but when we raise the money and if you get stronger, one day I'll take you to see one. —He turned again towards Earth— As you see, our shadow never covers Earth completely, so the totality is only seen from certain zones each time and it only lasts a few minutes, but… You know? It's a very special moment there, because it's the only time in which you can see the stars in the sky with the Sun above the horizon. Moreover… since the sizes coincide… when the Sun is almost covered you can see a kind of diamonds' ring, because its light still arrives between the mountains of the Moon, until totality occurs… And when this happens, the solar corona is seen with an impressive brightness, with incredible shapes… it almost seems like if a hole opened in the sky in the place where the Sun was…

A flood of distant memories and emotions came to his mind as he described it, looking at his home planet with moist eyes.

Saturday, April 5, 2008

Again, back to classes. Return from a period they call holidays but is not quite, in which despite the time used for classwork in detriment of leisure you didn't manage to finish ore than a small fraction of what you expected to do. As it always happened, holiday period after holiday period. It was always the same. But here I was, sit again in the return coach, next to the window, ready to start the journey.

What I like the most about having to do this journey is the contribution of spare time that it means. However busy you were, you always have those two and a half forced hours of leisure, just time for yourself without the worry of not be dedicating it to some of the class works that had to be submitted that same week. One can afford the luxury of feeling completely free from that kind of burden. If I think about it, it's probable that these spaces of time are the most similar thing I have to what one would understand by holidays during all the time the academic year can last.

So I decided to use that time. And I really wanted to make the most of it. I took from my bag the book I had started two days ago, with the intention of becoming totally absorbed again in it, when the film chosen by that day's driver started. It turned out to be an action one, not at all comparable to the work I was holding in my hands, so I prepared to continue. But the volume in the speakers was way too loud. This time, fortunately, I had a music player. I supposed maybe that would help ignoring the film, but the sound was too intense, and the person I had by my side didn't inspire enough confidence so as to leave my things and go to tell the driver. It seemed I would have to wait until he got off in the next stop (he did in every single town we went by), but it wasn't necessary. The trouble the sound was causing to the rest of the travelers was evident, and a girl close to the cab rose to make the request. It was a pity not to be able to show her gratitude. I decided to continue with my own music and immersed myself in the reading. Mars, the red planet, flooded my mind again.

The Martian landscapes continue to amaze me. The eastern cliff of Echus Chasma, thousands of meters in height and thousands of kilometers long, was captured in the lines my eyes were running over in that moment, while the more humble terrestrial geography passed by my window. How different they were. The first one, of gigantic proportions, barely changed since times in which bacteria were the most advanced organisms in our planet, surrounded in warm, reddish and ocher colors. In the second one, much younger but looking more smooth and aged by a much more intense erosion, green and blue colors dominated, created by the trees and crop fields, framed by the afternoon sky. Some clouds were appearing in it as we advanced to the north, all of them resting on an invisible layer at the same altitude and taking away monotony from the environment. I never get tired of gazing at them.

During the journey I combined the images of both worlds, focusing my attention alternatively in the book and the landscape. It is curious how when not having the sight limited to a few meters to the furthest wall, the images that emerge in the imagination when reading their descriptions can acquire at last tangible proportions, becoming true environments in which it is possible to look around. A 360 degrees view that reaches the horizon, in substitution of something that would be more similar to what can be seen in a television screen.

Time went by, and dusk was reaching its end. The Sun, surrounded by snippets of clouds tinged with orangey shades, was already close to the top of the western mountains. I decided to close the book and contemplate the scene, as many other times, watching how the bright red disk hid slowly, lighting the lower parts of the clouds with its last rays. It didn't take long to disappear, but except for its presence, the environment had hardly changed. There was still time until the blue of the sky gave way to the darkness of the night and its population of stars.

Stars which that night I could not contemplate, due to having work to finish when I arrived to my destination again. With a sigh, I decided not to let escape these last moments of freedom, and I continued absorbed in the reading…